Perfect Soldiers by McDermott Terry

Author:McDermott, Terry [McDermott, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-10-13T04:00:00+00:00

BOOK THREE

The Plot

CHAPTER 1

The New Recruits

AFGHANISTAN

MARWAN AL-SHEHHI LEFT HAMBURG FIRST. His departure came as something of a surprise to friends. It was November 1999, and Shehhi was in his first semester after finally being admitted to Technical University Hamburg-Harburg. He’d had a rocky passage through what was normally a straightforward year of preparatory study. He’d made the year into three and finally got through it with passing marks. “He had just bought new furniture, books, he wanted to study and had asked me to help him with the math,” said Mounir el-Motassadeq.1 “He said he would bring his wife from the Emirates. And then he left.”

Days later, Ziad Jarrah followed, then Mohamed el-Amir, and finally Omar, Ramzi bin al-Shibh. Jarrah and Amir, separately, took Turkish Airways flights, paid for with Shehhi’s army scholarship money, through Istanbul to Karachi. It isn’t clear what routes Shehhi and Omar took. Once in Karachi, the four men likely took domestic flights or buses to Quetta, the dusty desert capital of Baluchistan.2 Al Qaeda had begun avoiding the Peshawar route whenever possible; it had become too well watched.3 By the late 1990s, there was an almost paranoic fear of spies infiltrating the camps. Al Qaeda leaders had begun wearing masks to cover their faces, even in the camps.4 Osama Bin Laden had succeeded perhaps too well in drawing the world’s attention. His celebrity proved a double-edged sword—attracting danger as well as recruits—and necessitated more careful checking of newcomers. Some men were forced to wait at guesthouses on the Pakistan border for weeks before being brought inside Afghanistan. The men from Hamburg did not have that problem. They had been instructed to take taxicabs to the local Taliban office after their arrival in Quetta. Every driver will know where it is, they were told. And they did. They were told to leave everything behind at the Taliban guesthouse—all their belongings, passports, currency, even their names. As was standard procedure, they selected noms de guerre: Amir was Abu AbdulRahman, Jarrah chose Abu Tareq, Shehhi became Abul Qaqaa, and Omar picked Obeida al-Emerati.5 Recruits were typically given local clothing and taken to the border, which was a barrier in name only. Sometimes recruits were taken on motorcycles on routes that easily circumvented the guard posts. Other times, they simply drove through the checkpoints without having to show any identification whatsoever.

Despite all that had gone on around and about them, life in the camps had not changed much for a decade. It was dominated, like most military life, by the humdrum of routine. Up early, down early, and in between, exercise, drills, and lectures, exercise, drills, and lectures. If it weren’t for the prayers and the Afghan robes everyone wore, it would have been hard to tell it apart from basic military training anywhere in the world. The camp system, which at its high point encompassed more than fifty locations, under the supervision of various national fighting groups, was hierarchical. The main camps were sorting and marshaling yards where dueling jihadist groups competed for recruits.

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